How I Spent My Winter Vacation

Well, in the realm of the blindingly obvious, when I took note of the fact that much of The Knight Agency was going to be out west last week, it didn't even occur to me to mention that our own Julie Ramsey was attending the Sundance festival. You can read all about it on the agency blog.

As for how I spent my winter vacation, let's just say that the Snake River Lodge is truly the bomb. No wonder a Conde Nast poll showed it among the top ten resorts in America--yet there's nothing snooty about the place, which is very laid-back and, well, lodge-like.

Here's a picture I took out front of the hotel, with Rendezvous Mountain (I think that's the one) in the background:



When I went to Wyoming with Deidre last year, my very first time out there, I saw far more snow than I had in my entire life. Of course that's not really saying much, when you consider that, aside from a few very short stints in Chicago (the first and longest of which was the first year of my life, 1964-65), I've lived mainly in very warm climates: the Philippines as a child, Georgia growing up and as an adult, and the Carolinas for two years in the army. That said, I think somebody from much farther north could visit Wyoming and come away saying "I've never seen so much snow in my life." And on this second trip, there was far more snow than the last time; in fact, for much of our stay, it was actively snowing. Here's a shot I took through the opened window of our hotel room--opened not merely to get the picture, but because the room was overly hot, as were most of the shops in Jackson Hole. I guess when it's this cold outside, it's understandable that people would go overboard on heating.



But if you really want to experience cold, try snowmobiling through Yellowstone at forty-five miles per hour--which, by the way, feels about the way it would to be going 120 in a car. Wind whipping onto your face, inevitably finding that one little spot that you've failed to cover with balaklavas, caps, scarves, and visors. No wonder I came back with a sore throat. Then again, as I was driving through that otherwordly landscape (the setting, I should note, for much of the action in my wife's Parallel series books), it gave me some idea of what it's like to really be cold. Yellowstone, after all, sustains abundant plant life; so just imagine how cold it must be in Antarctica.

I'll sign off with this last picture, taken from an overlook near Old Faithful. (We timed our lunch so we could see it go off, though the kids started getting impatient. Finally I said out loud, "Ready when you are, O.F.," and whaddayou know, the thing finally blew.) But anyway, there's a waterfall in behind those trees, and you view it from a wooden deck layered in razor-thin sheets of ice. The picture doesn't really convey what it's like to be there, of course, and yet there's a hint of that "terrible beauty," to use Yeats's phrase--the splendor of virtually unadulterated nature, which does not exist to provide us with a warm fuzzy, but which rather reminds us of how small and frail we really are. Apparently I must have conveyed something of this to my three-year-old daughter (who stayed behind with her grandparents, precisely because Wyoming in January is no place for a rambunctious little rascal who's never learned not to trust), because she told her preschool teacher today, "Wymoming [note pronunciation] is beautiful but dangerous."

[As it turned out, for some reason I couldn't get that other picture uploaded, and it hardly matters anyway, because as I said, no photograph could really convey what I saw there. Also, a shout-out to Dana, who asked us to drop off some snow on the way over Oklahoma: in your original post, you actually requested "a planeload of now," a great example of how typos and verbal slips--to which I am as prone as anyone--can contain hidden truths. In fact, NOW is the word for The Knight Agency in 2006, a topic I'll discuss more when I post the song list for our "official" CD.]